No show? No show!

21 April 2009

At Mobile Monday we’re extremely happy with our active community. We’ve got many long-time members that have attended all, or almost all events since our start in June 2007. Currently we have more than 2,600 members and have about 450 seats available at every event.

RSVPs for the events go fast and we’re usually sold out in only a few hours. We’re really glad to see so much activity and willingness to attend our event!

But unfortunately all this activity doesn’t show on the date of the event. During the last Mobile Mondays we have been struggling with now a growing number of no-shows. Around 150-200 people that RSVPed “Yes” did not attend. This is disappointing for people on the waiting list (who can’t get in) and for us as organizers. There may be any number of reasons not to be able to make it. But 200 no-shows on a free event is simply too much.

For MoMo #11 we have introduced the snowball concept (invite valuable people to introduce others). But we are thinking of other ways of getting people to sign up AND attend the event. We have got some ideas for MoMo #12 and further, but we would like to hear your ideas as well.

What can we do to make the signup and attendance better for Mobile Mondays to come? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter (#momo).

Comments (6)

I can think of two solutions:
1. A small entrance fee, meant only to make it ‘hurt’ when you don’t show. This ofcourse contradicts the idea of a free event. A solution might be to have it be a deposit which is returned after attendance / letting know you won’t be there.
The disadvantage of this idea is of course the burden of having to pay for the visitor, even when the fee is returned after the event. For the organisers it will create an administrative burden.

2. Don’t allow entry to people who didn’t show the last time around. Disadvantages: Might give a bad feeling, feels somewhat ‘childish’ to punish them.

Although I agree with Dirkjan on the run on RSVP-ing, I think there should be a solution laying somewhere (and we’ll just have to find it).

1) show a list of the persons who RSVP’d on the site, but didn’t show up. But I guess a Wall of Shame is a REALLY bad idea with a lot implications like google indexing those pages and that page turning up as #1 position for their name…. that punishment is a bit harsch.

2) a remix of Joost’s #2: “Don’t allow entry to people who didn’t show the last time around.”…
Automatically “bench” the persons who’ve RSVP’d, didn’t come and didn’t free their seat the last time. “Bench” as in: if someone frees his/her spot, the a benched person receives a seat. This way they’re in the same spot as countless others the previous time. Let’s call this the “what comes around, comes around” solution.

3) Give people “karma points”, and the “karma points” * “first come first serve” determines who gets the seats. For example: I’ve been to 9 out of 10 Momo’s and never bailed out. So that will give me –as a regular Momo attendee– high Karma. On the other hand: people who signed up but didn’t attend will get negative Karma points, so they’ll have to sign up REALLY fast to get a seat. If they DO get a seat but don’t turn up, their karma points go even more down.
Key to this solution is that high Karma people can’t get a too high karma score. Else new people to Momo don’t have the opportunity to ever attend.

I have my doubts about karma / kudos / credits or something similar. These things works pretty well online on fora because there is high visibly and high activity. Having a bad karma really impacts your day to day activities.
I think that it will hardly have any effect on motivating people to actually show up at momo. The benefit of a high karma is also minimal. It might even have the opposite effect in the long run. People with high karma might use those points to not show up as it won’t impact them that much. It’s just like the climate change issue. People don’t feel the need to change because the impact is too low on their day to day life.

We’ll probably conclude in the end that there is no perfect solution but thats not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the most honest one.